HThis latest gem from the British master concerns the wreckage wrought on a variety of Londoners by a womanizing con man who speaks in rhymes. Here, as in A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999), Rendell's genius is to create characters so vivid they live beyond the frame of the novel. She pushes the ordinary to the point of the bizarre while remaining consistently believable. Araminta "Minty" Knox, the fragile center of the plot, is a 30-something woman, alone and obsessed with hygiene, who works in a dry-cleaning shop. All the world is a petri dish for Minty, who sees germs everywhere, which she attacks with Wright's Coal Tar Soap. She is equally tormented by the ghosts she imagines, her domineering "Auntie" and the man who took her virginity. Other characters hover on the borderline between transformation and disaster. Tory MP "Jims" Melcombe-Smith, in bed politically with the "family values" crowd, is simultaneously courting a gay lover. Working-class Zillah Leach, bored with her small children and smaller bank account, schemes to marry up, even at the risk of committing bigamy. This is not a whodunit in the sense of Rendell's Inspector Wexford novels, but a study of crime's origins and especially its consequences as they ripple out beyond the immediate victims. The plot is intricate but brisk, and Rendell nails her characters' psychology in all its perverse logic. She has a travel writer's sensitivity to setting, to the architecture, cemeteries, birds and vegetation of contemporary Britain. This is a literary page-turner, both elegant and accessible. (Feb. 19) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This is one of the best psychological thrillers from the prolific Rendell, whose honors include three Edgars and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and three Gold Daggers and a Diamond Dagger from the UK's Crime Writers Association. Part ghost story, part serial-killer hunt, part excoriation of the wicked ways of Westminster and Fleet Street, this tale tightens the noose of suspense through the build-up of vivid domestic and social detail and through the ways her characters' lives are intertwined. Two women, both of whom were loved and left by a man who is later murdered, share the most fateful of these links. One woman fears that the murdered man haunts her; the other's new life as the wife of a Conservative MP is threatened both by her connection to the murdered man and his death. (The portrait of a pack of bloodthirsty journalists ready to pounce on the MP's wife is especially chilling.) Rendell's great accomplishment here--what separates the novel from the usual stuff of whodunits--is the way she dramatizes the ripple effect of murder, the process through which individuals' lives can be altered or destroyed by the murder of someone either almost or completely unknown to them. Rendell's characters are fully drawn, and we become completely caught up in their struggles. Madly absorbing. --Connie Fletcher

Compulsive cleaner Araminta Knox is convinced she's being haunted by the ghost of her late fiance Jock Lewis, even though nobody but her believes he really died in that Paddington train wreck. The one impediment to Zillah Leach's forthcoming marriage of convenience to her childhood friend, gay MP James Melcombe-Smith, is that she never bothered to divorce her first husband, Jerry. Meanwhile, Fiona Harrington looks forward to a blissful life together with Jeff Leigh, the boyfriend her friends Matthew and Michelle Jarvey can't stand. What these women all have in common is not only an unsuitable man, but the same unsuitable man-and peerless con artist Jeffrey Leach has had his way with plenty of other unsuspecting females too. On an afternoon just like any other, one of the women he's left behind catches up with him in a dark cinema, and life promptly spirals out of control for his victims. Fiona mourns him with a passionate intensity that would better suit a wife of 20 years. Zillah and her MP, both frantic to keep their dirty linen hidden, come under suspicion of murder. As for Minty Knox, she's now so convinced she's hearing the voice of Jock's mother that she's begun to answer her back. The results, if they lack the unforgivingly logical momentum that used to be a signature of Rendell (Piranha to Scurfy, 2001, etc.), provide all the other hallmarks-the patient social observation, the cruelly ironic humor, and the sense of having penetrated to the unlovely core of several unforgettable characters-you'd expect from this master of psychological suspense.

It's probably a bad idea to become so complacent about an author that the reader fails to approach each new work with a healthy dose of skepticism. But with a master like British author Rendell, it's easy to have such confidence. Once again, Rendell has concocted an assortment of damaged but compelling characters. Michelle and Matthew are a husband and wife with complementary eating disorders: one acquaintance tauntingly calls them "large and little." Then there's Minty, morbidly obsessed with cleanliness and prone to seeing the ghost of her dead aunt. Last but not least, there's Zillah, a down-on-her-luck single mother whose best friend, a rich, closeted gay member of Parliament, has just proposed a marriage of convenience. Even the supporting characters in this book are interesting enough to have spin-off plots of their own. As it is, Rendell unfolds a story in which each of these characters is unknowingly connected to the others and all the events revolve around several brutal murders in London. Combining humor with painstaking character detail, Rendell offers her readers another mesmerizing psychological mystery. Recommended for all public libraries. Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.